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Tag: truth

Today is Batman day. I grew up in the 1960’s watching this show. It was inspiring that he took the murder of his parents and became a super hero protecting the innocent and catching the bad guys. A LemonadeMakers story.

When my kids grew up they loved all of the super hero’s that would go out and catch the bad guys. My son Seth was a huge Superman fan.

We have an extremely successful movie franchise going on for the past few years with the comic book super hero’s with Captain America, Iron Man, Thor and so on.

The Stars Wars Saga brings us hero’s that bring down the villains who are the dark side of the force. My oldest son was around 2 when it first came out. He sat mesmerized by the movie and didn’t move until the movie was over. He kept saying, “good show mommy, good show daddy”

What is the attraction? ‪Truth‬, ‪justice‬ and ‪the American way‬? I think that we all want to be an ‪everyday hero‬. I think that what attracted people to Batman, is he didn’t have a super power, but he used tools to take down the bad guys. It made it seem that anyone could put on a suit and make a difference. Is that the attraction, making a difference? I think so.

If we worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true really is true, then there would be little hope for advance. – Orville Wright – 1871-1948, Inventor and Aviation Pioneer

I find that (for me) the secret to testing what I believe to be true is reading about everything I can get my hands on. Every truth changes as I grow and change. That’s because each piece of knowledge becomes a building block expanding the rooms that I store all of my knowledge in. I get better views of things as the pieces form a new vista to look upon and discover something new around every corner, in every nook and cranny.

The number of inventions and records that have been broken were because someone didn’t believe it couldn’t be done are too numerous to mention. The Wright Brothers plane is just one of thousands. But it isn’t just inventions or sports records that are made that make this thought true. It is also in how we live our day to day lives.

I have learned different ways of thinking from the experiences that I have had as well as the experiences that others have had in their lives; how their truths intersect with mine and how there are threads in their history that match up to the threads in mine. They may have taken the pattern in a different direction, learned something fundamentally different than I did. They may even have different memories of something that we experienced together.

That doesn’t make their memory wrong, or them wrong or right in how they handled the experience. It is just different. Their pattern served them in some way, just as mine did. What I have learned though is that those patterns while serving me in some ways, have not served me in others. What I have learned is to let go of the attachment to my pattern. When I traced the threads of the pattern back to the beginning, I see where it has served me, and where it has caused myself and others pain.

A few years ago I told a story in a class up on stage about a defining moment in my childhood. I told a story about my mother when I was 13 yrs old and we were homeless. There was something that happened during that defined me as a person, with my vowing that I would never put my own family into the situation that we had devolved into through a series of bad choices my mother made.

The positive threads of this pattern were that I became very successful in a banking career. The negative aspect of this pattern was that unconsciously, I had made my husband feel that he wasn’t needed to provide for me or our family. It wasn’t until I told that story that I realized what I had done. It wasn’t intentional but it was an aspect of the pattern that I was living in up until that moment. Once I saw what I had done I had a long heart to heart conversation with my husband, and he said the most amazing thing – he said, “I loved you so much that I figured that I could live with it, just to have you in my life.”

I let go of the attachment to this truth that I had lived my life by. In your life, there are patterns that you are unconsciously living. If you are brave enough, you can trace the pattern back to the childhood experience(s) that created it. You can find in your life places in your life where it served you, and places were it didn’t. You can even realize as I did, that you can let go of that attachment and expand into a new truth.

We don’t have to accept life as it is, we can grow and make life different. We can expand our knowledge and wisdom and let go of the old truths and welcome in the new truths that are from love, trust, and gratitude. My son Joe when he was little had a pair of rain boots that he loved. Even when he outgrew them he would shove his feet into them and wear them. I would hide them (because I was saving them for his younger brother) and he would find them and put them on. I finally had to give them away, to keep them from hurting his feet. Don’t be like my son, and keep shoving your life into those boots who served you, but now you have outgrown them. Let go of the attachment, and accept a new truth or two into your life.

There are no limits, no can’ts, but there are unlimited possibilities and yes’s. We have an acronym with my BraveHeart Sisters “WEIP” – what else is possible? If you live life from that space, then you will advance forward confidently in the knowledge that yes, anything really is possible – even a new thought or truth (or in the case of Joe a new pair of rain boots)

“We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.” – William James

I always remember that Jack Nicholson line in “A Few Good Men”, “you can’t handle the truth”. That is what this quote reminds me of. Fact is a reality and truth is a perception of that reality.

It is hard to separate out facts from our truths. That is why we should never be married to “one” truth. As we grow, mature, and expand our learning we see things that we believe to be true, no longer serve us. If we are married to those beliefs it stops our growth right there and we stagnate.

If we change the meaning of an event, our brain responds to that new meaning and truth is thereby altered. For example you see someone you know who is married or in a relationship sitting in a restaurant hugging and hanging on a man you don’t know. You could assume that this person is having an affair and make a judgment about that. Later you could learn that this man was her brother. Now you have some facts that change the truth that you were believing.

I believe that this is how someone can have an experience which we would assume to be an experience that would make them a victim, yet they are not a victim. They have changed the meaning of the event, and by doing so they have altered the truth so that they were not the victim. They turn the event into the gift of learning how to go through the fire of tribulation and come out the other side stronger than they were when it began. To me this is what makes us all hero’s in our own lives – that we realize that we have ultimate control over our own lives.

Always test your “truth” to make sure that it shouldn’t change. Every new thing that we learn, changes what we already knew. Either completely or we just understand a new facet of the truth, we see it a little clearer. If we don’t allow for our truth or understanding of the world to change, then we can’t really accept any new learning. If we don’t accept any new learning or sharing of knowledge, then we’ve built ourselves a prison built out of bars of ignorance. You can’t live the life you are meant to live, unless you open yourself to the posibility that everyone you meet knows something that will help you on your journey. So like that four year old that asks “why” keep asking and seeking and you will find it!